Paul and Karla Hit the Net

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Paul and Karla Hit the Net

Recent events in Canada have proven once again that - for better or worse - the information genie has escaped into cyberspace and can't be put back in the bottle. When an Ontario judge issued an order barring media coverage of a sensationalized murder trial, Canadians used the Net to break the ban.

The case concerns Paul "Bernardo" Teale and his wife, Karla Homolka Teale, who were each charged in the grisly murders of two teenagers. Paul Teale now stands accused of 48 sex-related charges, while Karla Homolka entered into a plea bargain: She pleaded guilty to manslaughter and is expected to testify against Paul.

The nonstop press coverage prompted Paul Teale's lawyer to ask for a media gag order until the conclusion of his trial, on the grounds that it would be impossible to impanel an impartial jury. Faced with the concurrence of the Crown, the Court and Karla, Paul Teale's lawyer switched camps. But it was too late!

Despite legal intervention by several major Canadian media outlets, the court imposed a ban on the publication of the details of the crimes.

At first the ban had its desired effect. When the US television show A Current Affair featured the case, it was banned in Canada, and Canadian cable stations blacked out CNN coverage of the case.

With the conventional media halted, the infosphere took over. First, two BBSes in Toronto began to post daily details of the trial. In August, an irregular posting directly to newsgroup "control" ("approved" by "Justice Kovacs") created alt.fan.karla-homolka.

By December, after phone calls by law-abiding Net surfers to systems managers, the Usenet group had been banned by systems managers and university officials at sites all over Canada.

After the banning of alt.fan.karla-homolka, two new Usenet groups were created: alt.pub-ban and alt.pub-ban.homolka.

Some Net users theorized that if they cross-posted all over the Net, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would be in the impossible position of scrambling through cyberspace plugging leaks. One Net dweller jokingly proposed the ideal tactic: "The solution is obvious. Take the discussion to rec.sport.hockey. You silly Canadians would never ban that group."

Other curious Canadians searched the pay-per-view news and magazine databases on Nexis and CompuServe for stories published by US newspapers. Most of the banned articles were re-posted verbatim to alt.true-crime, a group overlooked by the Mounties.

As the infosphere grows to encompass the planet, the question is no longer whether certain information is too sensitive to be made public. The real question becomes whether it is even possible to keep certain information out of cyberspace. In the Teale-Homolka case, the ban was not so much broken as rendered irrelevant by the voracious online community: It is estimated that one in four Canadians knows the banned facts.